Never A Waste

¹When we desire something very strongly - good news regarding an application, for a loved one to turn aside from their foolish or sinful ways, for a family member to be saved and healed from a deadly accident or a debilitating illness - we very likely exercise more faith and pray harder and fast longer hours and generally pour out our souls more completely than at any other time. But when the application is rejected or the loved one will not turn from their road to perdition or the family member succumbs to their wounds and illnesses and dies, were all of those prayers and fasting wasted? Did we exercise so much faith for nothing? The answer is a resounding no! When we go to the gym and run on the treadmill or lift weights, from a certain point of view, it looks like our efforts were completely wasted. We might have run for an hour but still we are in the same place. We may have lifted some very heavy objects over and over but when we are done, they are right where we left them. But exercising at the gym is not about getting ourselves or our weights from point A to point B. It's about building up our stamina and our muscles and making us strong and able to endure a lot of strenuous effort without passing out. Could not the same principles apply to our opportunities to exercise our faith? Imagine that a relative of ours is diagnosed with severe cancer and is given only a few months to live. Now, God could come down in a pillar of light and tell us that our relative is going to die in exactly eighty-two days, six hours and forty-seven minutes no matter how much we pray or fast or plead with Him to change His mind. Or, He could allow us to exercise our faith and pray like we've never prayed before and through our grief treat every moment with our sick relative as a beautiful and precious gift not to be wasted or taken for granted. No, all of our faith and prayers did not get rid of the cancer or stop them from dying, just like running on a treadmill for an hour didn't actually take us anywhere. But in both cases, the exercise we did built up our ability to endure. Just because the answers to our prayers were the opposite of what we hoped and prayed for does not mean our faith and prayers were wasted. God is not looking down on us and having a good laugh that we are making useless prayers that won't change anything. He is so proud of us that in these dark moments we are finding the strength to continue to hope against hope and to exercise our faith right up until the very last moment. We won't know all of the reasons that God had to deny our sincere and faith filled and heartfelt prayers, but we do know that He weeps and suffers right alongside us when the tragedy we tried so hard to avert finally hits home. For His own wise purposes God had to insist that His will, and not ours, be done, but whatever other reasons that may exist, one of them and not the least important is that this period of fasting and praying and exercising our faith with every particle of our being has made us stronger and more able to endure. And that is never a waste.